Some wonder why Rachel McAdams has taken so long to break out–it’s more than six years since Mean Girls and The Notebook. Now the NYT wonders if she’s on the brink of a blockbuster, as her latest, the romantic comedyMorning Glory, is set to open November 10. While there have been “few glaringly stupid” choices, notes the NYT, and she shows a wide range (from crowd-pleaser Wedding Crashers to sprawling ensemble State of Play to the pretty girl in Sherlock Holmes), she hasn’t exactly broken out with a star-making role, has she? It’s not so much her performances as the execution of these middle-of-the-road studio films. Morning Glory director Roger Michell gushes that McAdams “just radiates life. She has two sets of muscles. One is a kind of railway map of the script, which must be adhered to, and the other is emotional, meaning she can see what floats through the window on the day of shooting and go with that.” She makes the work-life balance sound easy: “Being an actor, you get to have so many lifetimes in one…I like the comfort of home, the stability and security, but I also want to travel and do new things. Being an actor expedites that.”

“There are very few heroic figures who, as one finds out more about them, actually live up to or even exceed their reputations,” writes Naomi Wolf for Interview Magazine. “Valerie Plame Wilson is one of them.” As the central character (played by Naomi Watts) in Doug Liman’s true-to-life Fair Game (November 5), which chronicles the illegal outing of CIA agent Plame, the pressures on her marriage to one–time U.S. ambassador Joseph C. Wilson (Sean Penn), and the Bush administration’s falsified WMD intelligence, Plame is a too-good-to-be-true subject for a film. Her guess as to why her story was movie-worthy: “it seems to me that we’re living and moving through the world, especially in America, in an environment where, for the younger generation–which means younger than you and I, Naomi–the concept of privacy doesn’t exist in the same way it does for us. So I think that the idea that someone would knowingly and willingly keep a portion of their life secret is really intriguing.”

The Office star Rainn Wilson has a book coming out November 2, not to mention the upcoming film Super starring Liv Tyler (as his wife) and Kevin Baker (as the drug dealer who steals her). If Oprah featured the book Soul Pancake on her show, we can assume that it’s more sincere than Dwight K. Shrute’s shenanigans in The Office. Wilson spoke with Vulture and confirmed the goal of the book, which “chews” on life’s big questions, and should serve as a tool for “the spiritual and creative revolution that’s coming, which “[has to be] in the cards…because the world is grinding to a halt. That sounds lofty, but it’s really about getting young people talking about life’s big questions and getting them to expand their minds. Hopefully we’ll be a small, healthy tool in a larger movement.” As for his faith, Wilson says: “The way to God is through art, it’s through love and creativity, things that allow us to transcend the mere material.” But he doesn’t want to be the face of his religion (the Baha’i faith). He wants “to be a spokesperson for thinking outside the box.”